Sorry, it can be fast and painless. Super OD of morphine. Supresses the breathing and since the first effect is tranqing the person, painless for person and observers… Guy gets shot up, goes to sleep, stops breathing. Bobs your uncle.
Besides, it could give all those Dr Death and Nurse Deaths a job … they seem to have practice putting reasonably healthy people down fast and painless…
90% of the time, that’s how it plays out. The other 10%, the patient vomits, aspirates, spends a few minutes choking slowly on their own secretions, turns blue, ruptures blood vessels in their eyeballs, etc. Public outrage, courts step in, saying this is cruel and unusual, and there you go.
Most of Kevorkian’s measures may have worked nicely most of the time. But it seems the legal requirement will be for something that works nicely 99.9999% of the time.
No, it’s been done with blanks in at least one case: Gary Gilmore. From the Court TV Crime Library:
Still with the execution of Gary Gilmore, but from the BBC:
I remember this at the time, because it was fairly contentious. The US had had a moratorium on capital punishment for a few years at this point, and Gilmore’s execution was seen by many as not the way to end it. A firing squad? But Utah allowed the condemned to elect the method, apparently, and “firing squad” was on the list of methods, and Gilmore chose that one. He also refused his appeals. But the papers and news reports were full of “how a firing squad works” items and the use of a blank was in every one.
Do any of the methods work 100% of the time? I disagree that a heroin overdose is painful to the victim or particularly difficult to administer - I have ‘died’ from a heroin overdose twice (I haven’t used drugs for a long time now btw) and both times it was pleasant if anything. Surely if a junky with next to no veins can administer a lethal shot of ‘street’ heroin surely someone reasonably medically trained could find a vein and administer a massive does no problems - it’s got to be at least as reliable a way as the chair and far less ‘aggresive’ as the electric chair. I don’t know anyone who’s had too much smack and been in pain or distress - it seems you are either high or unconscious in my experience.
Now that you mention it, I do remember that from The Executioner’s Song. When I posted earlier I was thinking about military executions for some reason. I think the point is still valid and that Gilmore’s execution was unique.
ETA: I take that back. Using a blank does seem like just the sort of innefective guilt avoidance a civilian administration would come up with. I seriously doubt it has ever been common practice in the military. ICBW.
Today, we have a variety of devices which instantly end the lives of people we have decided are our enemies in Iraq and Afganistan. When there is time to aim, the target is dead before he knows he’s been hit. What would be cruel or unusual about telling a murderer’s family there may not be much left to bury? You could even offer the condemned the chance to remotely trigger his own death.
That reminds me, way back on the old Phil Donohue show, Dr. Kevorkian was on demonstrating his execution/suicide machine which worked the same way. That was before he started his new career as mercy-killer.
Lethal injection works 100% of the time so long as the technician can find and enter a vein, but in lifelong IV drug users that can be extremely difficult. If you have experience with heroin, you’ve probably seen someone who can’t find a vein anywhere despite an unnervingly long time poking around. It can be a bloody, grisly experience. The technicians carrying out the execution have the same problem (and possibly less experience than the user), so finding a vein to perform the execution take quite a long time. Some states have resorted to the use of the “cut-down method,” in which a vein is laid open with a scalpel to allow the insertion of the needle. When I met the warden of the Walls unit in Huntsville where Texas executions are performed he was adamant that Texas has never used the cut-down method.
I dunno. Many years ago I read a book about Private Slovik’s (sp?) execution in WWII, and it specifically mentioned that use of the blank was SOP. It further mentioned that the SOP dated from the Civil War, and that while a soldier might not have been able to tell if there was a blank round in his musket, he could certainly tell with an M-1 Garand. Nonetheless, a blank was used because it was the Army, and that was the drill.
Why are all the methods of capital punishment so…weird?
They’re attempts to make an uncomfortable event more comfortable.
I guess I stand corrected.
Maybe this is a silly question, but why couldn’t we just drop a very very heavy object on a person’s head after admineristing anesthetic?
Only if he attacks you with a banana.
Stranger
What about pointed sticks?
My solution is one that no-one ever agrees with or supports, but it still makes sense to me.
Let me introduce a few conditions. Let’s suppose the criminal that has been sentenced to death is someone who has committed rape or murder, there is no doubt as to his guilt (he has been tried and sentenced, and he admits it), and we know the community or neighbourhood in which he perpetrated his offences, and in which he caused untold amounts of pain, grief, anger, anxiety and fear.
On the day for this criminal’s demise, as appointed by the court, you hire an empty room and you invite anyone from that terrorised community to come to the room. You make it clear that it’s okay to bring things like baseball bats, iron bars and knives. The first 20 people who show up are allowed in. You then throw the criminal in there among them, with his hands securely cuffed behind his back, and you close the door. It is understood by all that there will be no questions asked about what happens, and if the 20 guys happen to walk out an hour later, and the criminal happens to be dead by that time, that that’s okay and the authorities will see to the disposal of the body.
The criminal opted to terrorise the neighbourhood and inflict pain on defenceless victims. It’s only fair to give the ‘neighbourhood’ a chance to return the favour. This way, the criminal may finally understand why it’s not a nice thing to do.
“It’s inhumane!”
“It’s encouraging mob violence!”
“It’s barbaric!”
“It’s Old Testament eye-for-an-eye rubbish!”
“It’s just not civilised!”
Sure, shoot me down. I really couldn’t care less. I have seen some of the pain and fear that violent criminals can inflict on an entire community. I really don’t worry too much about making the perpetrator’s last moments ‘comfortable’. He deserves to suffer as painfully as possible. Just my opinon.
Everybody has someone who cares about what happens to them, even murderers and rapists. People who would likely wait in line a long time for that person in order to be sure to get a chance to help them.
There would be more than one body coming out of that room, and I am not sure any of them would be the felon.
Contrary to the OP, death by hanging can be very fast.
The standard and long drops were both intended to work by breaking the neck and severing the spinal cord.
This was the method used in the UK for the last coupole hundred years until capital punishment was abolished.
The next fast method was the Halifax Gibbet, which was also about as quick as death can be made.
I’m sure those of us of a certain age remember this photo (the one at the top)
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/images/life/VCexecute.jpg&imgrefurl=http://travellingdarren.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html&h=424&w=592&sz=72&hl=en&start=8&tbnid=gNxokjlzvKlslM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522viet%2Bnam%2522%2Bstreet%2Bexecution%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den
(sorry, that was the best link I could come up with)
Quick, efficient, few ways to fail, & those few are easily correctible in just seconds.
The entire issue is that modern sensibilities require a no-mess solution. Seems to me that if we lack the stomach for messy solutions, we really ought to be out of the business.
It’s GD whether we’d do better to grow a stomach or quit killing cons, so I’ll leave my opinon on that issue out of this.
Or even an overdose of general anaesthetic as used in surgery. The only problem would be that few if any doctor would agree to administer it to cause death.